


The Strange/Stark Constrast

by TintedPink



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Emotional neglect, Family Betrayal - Freeform, Found Family, Gen, M/M, switched at birth - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 15:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19793917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TintedPink/pseuds/TintedPink
Summary: It started with one of those stupid DNA box kits. Dad wanted to know “Where they really came from,” and Mom couldn’t be bothered to persuade him out of it. The farm was having a good year and they could afford to waste the money if they didn’t do anything else fun for a while. Tony and Donna thought it was a huge waste of time, but didn’t say so, because sibling conspiracies are almost always best kept between siblings.They spit into a bunch of tubes, because there’s nothing that facilitates family bonding quite like spitting into tubes in front of the TV together, and they sent the tubes away. Those tubes were going to damn him, Tony Strange, to the limbo hellscape that would become his life. Some people said that he should be envious of everything he would gain, but they didn’t understand exactly how much he was going to lose.He lost everything when he became Tony Stark.





	The Strange/Stark Constrast

**Author's Note:**

> It's here! The switched at birth AU that I've been planning for months is here!  
> This first chapter is kind of an intro, but the next chapters will be significantly longer than this. I'm going to have chapter 2 up in the next couple of days, and then try for a regular update schedule of one chapter every other Saturday. I may change the posting day depending on how Saturdays work out for me, but we'll see.

Our story begins in a sterile New York hospital, at around ten pm. Two mothers were in labor of varying degrees of difficulty, each giving birth for the first time to their first sons. Though all labors are difficult, Beverly Strange had been transported to the Metro General from her small town’s country hospital due to the expected difficulty of her coming birth. She’d been checked into the hospital three days prior with possible symptoms of early labor, but her water had only broken a few short hours before.

Well, the hours certainly didn’t seem short to Beverly, who was in excruciating pain and had refused any and all pain medication, citing the desire to have a natural birth.

The doctors did not agree with her, but since she was already undergoing a great ordeal and shouldn’t be stressed any more than was absolutely necessary, they didn’t argue with her.

Across the hall in a similar, though somewhat larger, delivery room was Maria Stark, who had been in labor for over 12 hours and was about three more contractions away from breaking every bone in her husband’s left hand. He had switched it out away from his right hand when he realized that not only was he not getting out of the hospital any time soon, but he was likely not getting out unscathed.

These two mothers and the children they will give birth to are the beginning of life for Stephen Stark and Tony Strange. Due to an unfortunate series of events, Tony and Stephen’s lives were going to become increasingly complicated, starting about four hours after their respective births.

And then they will become even more complicated sixteen years later when they realize the mistake that will be made by an overworked hospital employee just trying to do her best to take care of the screaming infants in her care.

Mrs. Beverly Strange gave birth to Stephen Strange (who would soon become known at Stephen Stark) at approximately 10:05 pm after two and a half hours of labor and a three-day hospital stay.

Mrs. Maria Stark gave birth to Tony Stark (who would soon become known as Tony Strange)at approximately 10:08 pm after 12 hours of labor, three apology bears, four apology bouquets and one bruised husband hand.

Maria had the typical infant experience and held her somewhat disgusting, blood-covered child for a whole five seconds before he was carted away to be bathed, diapered and clothed. Maria let them take the baby because she was exhausted, and Howard, for one of the only times in Tony or Stephen’s life, handled the infant’s care-taking until Maria was recovered enough to see him

Beverly, on the other hand, was immediately taken to surgery, where she was sewn back together, the majority of the major bleeding was stopped and she was kept away from her son out of precaution for her various and serious medical traumas. She did not want to let them take her baby away, screaming at the god damn doctors to let her see her fucking baby or so help her Jesus, Christ, and God.

The doctors were not swayed.

Eugene Strange let the nurse take his son away, trusting the hospital to care for him until he was ready to see him, and his wife was out of surgery.

About five minutes apart, two clear sided cradles were rolled into the neonatal unit and placed side by side, with one bearing the label “Strange” and the other bearing the label “Stark” along with their birth times and parent’s names. Neither of these children had been officially named yet, but even if they had been, the boys were so young that they never could have known that their names would be changed just a few hours later.

As many babies do, the one who would soon become Stephen, laying unhappily swaddled in the cradle, began to bawl. The reasons that infants cry are numerous and inexhaustible, and no one who is still alive today has any idea why he might have been crying, but he was crying. Beside him, the infant who would become Tony Strange had his lip start to wobble and the attendant at the neonatal ward knew that she would have to stop Strange before Stark started in too and the whole ward woke up. She picked up little Strange carefully in one arm, supporting his head with the crook of her elbow and trying desperately to get him to calm down. He hadn’t messed his diaper, so maybe he was hungry? She started to try to feed him, but as soon as she did, Stark started to cry as well.

This is where our predicament really begins.

The nurse, not knowing what else to do, unwisely picked up the other baby, rocking him gently and hoping that would soothe him enough to get him to quiet down. She had no hands free at this point, but she wasn’t so inexperience, and she had the microwave preset for just the right amount of time to warm infant formula to an optimal temperature. She pushed the button with her elbow, still careful of the baby’s head, and continued to rock and sooth, cooing at the little babies Stark and Strange.

What happened next could be chalked up to a lot of things. The nurse on duty didn’t have any recollection of when she might have switched the children and simply guessed that this must have been the moment. It had been a particularly long shift for her, and she wasn’t very experienced in the neonatal ward. Her usual shift was pediatrics, toddlers who usually knew their own names or had various physical distinctions that made it very easy to tell them apart. In small babies, especially infants that one has only seen for a short while, it can be exceedingly difficult to tell them apart. And when you’ve worked a fourteen-hour shift already, that difficulty only increases.

For the record, nobody blames the nurse. Most people blamed the system that allowed her to work for fourteen straight hours in a ward that wasn’t her usual ward on a day that was supposed to be her day off once the news broke. In sixteen years and some months, the poor woman would be horrified at the turn of events that she caused during her shift. Maybe if you were alive for that, you know. I wasn’t, but I did get a chance to meet that nurse later in her life. She was a very kind woman.

In any case, somehow, someway, the two babies got mixed up. When she put down one to feed the other, she put him down in the wrong cradle, Strange ending up in the Stark cradle and Stark ending up in the Strange cradle.

The Stark cradle would be rolled away shortly after, as Maria would be awake from her nap and ready to see her infant, but the Strange cradle, filled with Tony Stark, soon to become Tony Strange, would not be wheeled into his mother’s hospital room until two days later, when Beverly was lucid enough to hold him. Eugene Strange walked between the neonatal unit and the recovery unit more times than he could count, unknowingly visiting someone else’s child who he was beginning to love as his own.

Neither Beverly nor Maria could tell the difference between the switched children they had only seen for moments. Some people thought they should have, because who doesn’t recognize their own child? I have never had a child, but Beverly Strange, who I had the chance to interview before her death, have agreed that infants are wrinkled runts of indistinguishable human features and anyone who can tell the two apart when they weren’t expecting them to be any different would have to have an eidetic memory or be a doctor exclusively to neonates.

Of course, the doctor exclusive to neonates who was caring for both Stephen and Tony didn’t notice a difference either, so it’s hard to say if anyone could have known the difference if it hadn’t been pointed out to them.

The difference wouldn’t be pointed out to them, as I’m sure you know or have guessed, for sixteen years. Sixteen years of blissfully ignorant family life shattered in just a few minutes by a DNA kit that was supposed to be able to tell them their ancestry.

Strange, isn’t it? How something so simple can ruin so many lives. Put a baby down in the wrong place and it goes to the wrong house, put your DNA in a tube and it comes back and tells you that you’re not really your parent’s child.

Stephen Stark and Tony Strange don’t know what’s happened to them yet when that nurse put them down and gives them formula and tends to their every need while they wait for their parents to be ready to see them. They have no idea what kind of fate is in store for them, or what that means for their lives.

When Howard Stark holds Stephen Stark for the very first time and presents him to Maria, he’s none the wiser to the genealogy of the boy. He doesn’t care. He still loves the boy, though his hand is sore from his wife’s squeezing. Maria looks into Stephen’s baby blue eyes and she smiles at him in the same way that she would if he was her biological son, who was still sitting pathetically in a hospital nursery, waiting for Eugene and Beverly to be ready to have him back with them.

When Eugene Strange holds up Tony Strange, his son but not his son, for Beverly to see through the window of her hospital room, he doesn’t care that the child in his hands isn’t biologically his. What he cares about is how happy Beverly seems, even on a high dosage of painkillers, to see her son, even if his eyes are unfocused and his hands are covered in little mittens to keep him from clawing his own face to pieces.

What happened to Tony Strange and Stephen Stark was pure coincidence. It could have happened to any two babies, but it happened to them, and they eventually make the best of situation.

And that’s what this story is really about. Stephen Stark and Tony Strange making the best of their situation and conquering the complicated realm of biologically family, psychological family and found family. The fact that they will eventually fall in love with each other isn’t the point of the story, even though it is one of the best parts of it.

The relationship these two circumstantial friends came out of could have ended in disaster, and at times it did, but between the two of them, they achieved unthinkable and nearly impossible deeds. They were remarkable men, and it’s an honor and a privilege to be here to tell their story.

I know I said that was the beginning, but now let’s really begin.

**Author's Note:**

> For more Switched at Birth AU content, check my [tumblr](iwritefanficsometimes.tumblr.com).  
> If you want to talk about this AU my ask box is always open and I do my best to reply to all comments (but sometimes it takes me a while).  
> Thanks for reading!


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